The key elements here are how you find out the data, and how you use it. As a candidate, you should know what employers can and can’t ask you. As a potential employer, be careful how you ask your questions. I encourage you to check this piece out and learn more.

You’ll be presented with choices — you could add the feed to your Google,Yahoo, or AOL custom home pages, or take the ‘raw’ version of the feed and add it to a program like News Gator http://www.newsgator.com/individuals/default.aspx which lets you read feeds on mobile, in windows or mac, and even within your Outlook inbox.

If you added the feed to your Google homepage it would look like this:

Or to your Google reader, it would appear like this.

As an entrepreneur, using a reader can help you control your information flow and find useful content. As a marketer, creating feeds can amplify your marketing efforts.

PRESSfeed is a company that specializes in helping PR and Marketing people and small business owners who are not technically oriented get fresh content on their own sites easily, and distribute their content it to other sites. Sally Falkow, Co-Founder of PRESSfeed, told me “Our system makes their content more visible and gets their messages to more audiences which they may not have reached. For example, for a construction industry client that does water-scapes, paving and pool surrounds, PRESSfeed got them onto the first page of Google for their search terms. When they added content regarding a new geographic location, these showed up in the targeted searches.”

In another case, a phone integrator client’s feed got added by other site, a Hispanic business site, and soon they got called by journalist from a different business magazine. Once content is in a feed, it is easy for customers who like your product to share it via sites like Delicious, Twitter, StumbleUpon, and even post links in Facebook.

According to Falkow, within 3-6 months, the feed can be a top driver traffic to website. And Google software engineer Matt Cutss has said many times that adding fresh content in a feed helps get a site better search engine ranking. “It is such an easy way to spread and distribute your content — why wouldn’t you put your content in a feed?” asks Falkow. She also notes from recently conducted research she performed that only 14% of top entrepreneurs are using feeds on their news content — so there’s an opportunity to differentiate.

Jeff Pulver
Presence is the key to Social Media – from “dial tone” to presence – which will trigger conversation more directly than just dial tone – whether FB or Twitter or other.
Based on your relationships and what you’re sharing – that is what triggers business and relationships

Chris Brogan
Raising Armies and Navigating the 7 Seas of Blogging
– There was the Naval/ Queen’s fleet – England would try to fight America, but we fought in a non-standard way. SO England found Pirates to fight for them.
– English cared about the paint job on their ship. Pirates didn’t. They just did what was asked of them.
Difference between Engineers and Marketers – “This is how we do stuff” vs. “We’re going to die! Oh, wait, my mistake.”
Get over the notion that we’re doing some thing cool, and DO SOMETHING with it.
At end of Matrix – Neo realizes he no longer has to Dodge the bullets – he can just manipulate the data.
SO Ignore the leadership who don’t get it – and work with people who do or who want to get it.
2009 – Work outside your own company framework and engage with them. Build virtual group, teams, organizations and engage.

UPDATE: My comment – This year, 2009, should be the year we stop telling people they “don’t get it” and what I hope to do this year is to make sure everybody gets it.

On Wednesday, Jeff Pulver’s Social Media Jungle conference will run at the Consumer Electronics Show. Dean Landsman and I will be speaking about the Challenges of the 3 Screen World – namely, your computer, TV and mobile device. There are many ways we interact with information in all these media, and we’ll discuss what customers (the people formerly known as consumers) are looking for, who’s doing a good job giving it to them, and what you need to know to reach these people. (These people being, of course, most of America.) We’re also thinking about how Social Media and technology change across the 3 screens – you’re not doing Facebook on your TV – yet – but where are the things that make this easier? You’ll have to see us Wednesday in Vegas to find out more.

I recently had the privilege of speaking at the Association of Junior Leagues International‘s Leadership Conference in Kansas City, Missouri. At the conference my talks were on using Social Media for recruiting new members, retaining existing members, and promoting the excellent work of the organization does. One talk was on the Basics of Using Social Media for Non Profits, the other on Implementing Social Network Strategies.
One of the stories I heard there speaks to exactly the way that I believe all this new social networking technology can be used. In one of my sessions, a woman from the Junior League in a mid-western city mentioned that on her way to a new-member recruiting meeting, she changed her Facebook status. She wrote, “Heading to the Junior League recruiting meeting, contact me if interested or go to website” (with the actual website listed.)
From this 30-second action, done on her Blackberry, she got ten inquiries. From these inquiries, the Junior League in her area brought in three new members. That’s a ten-second per member recruiting return on investment of time. There was no cost. The best part of her story was when she said she told her board, “If you had all done this simple action and changed your Facebook status, imagine how many more members we could have had.”
This doesn’t mean I’m saying Facebook status is the new advertising or a substitute for your regular outreach. Certainly, your mileage will vary. But it is a clever way to use something people do every day to positively promote a good cause.
A different group of women at the conference told me that they keep a blog for their League, and update it 2-3 times a week. They found that this simple process was enabling them to avoid what they said was hundreds of e-mails, every week. Plus, people were attending events more often, and they credit this to the regular messaging and communication. Even though they also have a regular newsletter, the blog is helping them to get their communications out quickly and broadly.
Often, I hear people say, “I don’t have time to spend on Facebook, I don’t have time to write a blog”, or “I don’t have time to learn how that stuff is done.” It is real-life stories like these that show the advantage of using just a short amount of time to get a very large result.
Finally, to the point that “I don’t have time to learn how these networks work, or how this stuff is done” – ok, you don’t have to. But don’t block it. You’re a leader – enable one of your trusted people to do the communication for your organization, with regular reports and feedback so you know what’s working and what isn’t. Let them help you understand as much as you can. While you may not use these tools, your up-and-coming future members will be using them, and your success depends on communicating with your constituency where they are, in the manner in which they want to get that message.

About The Group

br>

The Harbrooke Group specializes in helping companies and nonprofits communicate with their customers and stakeholders using the latest digital tools. We are specialists in content creation, storytelling, and translating difficult concepts into business english. Harbrooke brings a network of additional consultants from around the world together for different projects based on their unique capabilities and experiences.